"I think we've lost [the] war, as a lot of other people think, too. The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, 'You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us.' And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that."
— George Wald, addressing an antiwar strike at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1969
" We weren't on the wrong side. We were the wrong side."
— Daniel Ellsberg , Hearts and Minds (1974)
"Look, I know our granddads and our dads, they went over to Europe to save the world. And I would put today's guys up there with them any day. And I mean any day. But I'm not so sure we're saving the world this time."
— John "Chickie" Donohue, The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)
"When I hear these fucking pussies today whining about Afghanistan or Iraq..how many we've lost, how many civilians we've wiped out...what we're doing to the region or what it says about us as a nation or when are we going to bring the troops home, I say-I have just one word for you stupid cocksuckers: 'Nam. The greatest American fuck up of all time. Lose sixty thousand of your own killing three million of the locals. Let the Khmer Rouge get in next door, that's another million right there. Make the guy in the G.I lid, everyone's savior from World War Two, make him into a rapist and a butcher in the eyes of the world... And still lose, well, you manage all that and maybe you and me can have a conversation"
— Nick Fury, Fury: My War Gone By
"In 1965, Vietnam seemed like just another foreign war, but it wasn't. It was different in many ways, as so were those that did the fighting. In World War II, the average age of the combat soldier was 26. In Vietnam he was 19."
— Peter Thomas, Vietnam Requiem (1982) which was later sampled in Paul Hardcastle's song, "19"
"This will be the final message from Saigon station. It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. This experience, unique in the history of the United States, does not signal necessarily the demise of the United States as a world power. The severity of the defeat and the circumstances of it, however, would seem to call for a reassessment of the policies of niggardly half-measures which have characterized much of our participation here despite the commitment of manpower and resources, which were certainly generous. Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing off."
— Final message from the U.S. Embassy, Saigon.
